“The line-break enacts the rift between sense and language that language always tries to conceal, tries to heal,” Cole Swensen writes. This seminar lingers with Swensen’s rift by considering the function of poetic lineation across languages, disciplines, and historical periods. Do poetic lines take up space or time? or both? The answer might change dramatically across the historical caesura that is the shift from performance to print, from meter and rhyme to free verse. How have poetic lines historically been measured—prosodically, syntactically, semantically—by standards both aesthetic and economical? What exactly does a line-break mark, and how does it interact with internal forms of breaking and patterning (the volta, the hemistich, assonance, consonance, rhyme)? How do the value and use of poetic lines change in the wake of what Raza Ali Hasan calls “the acrimonious divorce of meter and phrasing”—that is, in the era of free verse lineation? Anglocentric accounts of contemporary poetry tend to take free verse as a given, yet conventional and strophic forms continue to govern much of the world’s poetry (particularly popular poetry) well into the twentieth century and up to the present day.[1] 

The seminar also asks how poetic lines become units of value and exchange in modernity. If, as Theodor Adorno writes, “the unresolved antagonisms of reality reappear in art in the guise of immanent problems of artistic form,” then what historical, political, economic, and/or social antagonisms were modern poets and critics working out in their discussions of poetic forms? We wish to investigate cases in which verses are either subjected to financial trade or said to be removed from it, in which a poem’s length signifies the writer or publisher’s own labor, and in which poetic lines are held up against one another for appraisal from readers, critics, and/or other poets. We seek to understand the pressures that abstract ideals of poetic creation place upon materialist values of capital markets, mass media, and the technical world of print. How does a line of poetry prove its “worth” among middle-class readers? Is it possible to grant new life to the Classical epic genre by repurposing its stanzaic units and pulling apart its old meters? What role does translation play in measuring poetic lines? Do rhetoricians continue to stigmatize enjambment as a defect even when traditional rules of composition dissolve in the tumult of the World Wars? Finally, what role can the contingent, even endangered line play in our own twenty-first century lives as readers, looking back upon 500 years of shifting poetic value? 

We welcome papers on poetry in any language, from any time period, so long as the primary concern is the line—its measures, its breaks, its meanings.

[1] The citations are from Emily Rosko and Anton Vander Zee, eds. A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011).